Now it's official. Auschwitz was not
built by the Poles as a "tourist attraction" after World War
II, after all. Jews were gassed there, and Hitler
knew about the Final Solution before 1943.

The grisly history of the Holocaust is familiar to most
of us, but not to everybody. David Irving, the
British "historian," argues that the Holocaust is overrated
as tragedy and he embellishes it with perversity, such as
the notion that Auschwitz was a sort of Disney World of
death for ghoulish tourists. He thought enough of his
crackpot ideas to defend them in court. A judge found them
indefensible.

The judge found that Deborah Lipstadt, a professor
of Jewish history at Emory University in Atlanta, had not
libeled him when she called him a Holocaust denier. The
judge went even further; Mr. Irving, he said, was "an
anti-Semite and racist" who deliberately misrepresented and
misinterpreted the historical record.

Mr. Irving sued
Miss Lipstadt and her British publisher, Penguin UK. He sued
in England where libel is much easier to prove than in the
United States, where a plaintiff must not only prove
falsity, but malicious intent.

Miss Lipstadt accused him of willfully exploiting his
academic expertise by bending and twisting historical
evidence to conform to his neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic
sympathies.

Mr. Irving argued that branding him a "Holocaust denier"
is the equivalent of calling him a "wife-beater" or a
"pedophile" and that he was merely redefining the record.
The accusation, he argued, ruined his scholarly reputation,
causing publishers to reject his manuscripts. His books once
produced an income of nearly $100,000 a year.

Both author and publisher decided to stand and fight in a
costly and brain-draining trial rather than making the suit
go away by apologizing and donating $400 to David Irving's
favorite charity.

"Normally I don't debate with
these Holocaust deniers on principle because I don't
think they should be treated as 'the other side,'" she
told the London Telegraph. "But if I had not fought, he
would have won by default and people would have thought
his version of the Holocaust to be a legitimate
definition."

That's true. We still have eyewitnesses and Holocaust
survivors to testify to the hideous truth of the
extermination camps, and how much easier to distort the
record after the actual participants are gone.

Polls show that 38 percent of high school students and 28
percent of American adults can't identify the Holocaust.
Librarians often place books by Holocaust deniers next to
authentic histories. In Pittsburgh
a high school class president, supported by his father,
accused a history teacher of being one-sided when she didn't
include David Irving's Holocaust revisionism in her history
seminar. A Polish professor of history at the state-run
University of Opole taught that death camps were built only
to kill lice on prisoners. (He
was fired.)

Mr. Irving claims to have raised a half-million dollars
in contributions as small as $2 and as large as $80,000.
He'll need all that and considerably more now that he is
required to pay the legal fees for the defense, estimated to
be about $3 million.

Mr. Irving was once respected for his military
scholarship, for digging out raw archival material for
original interpretations about the Third Reich. But
skepticism long ago sank to taunt and insult. He describes
"The
Diary of Anne Frank" as a romantic novel; he asks an
Auschwitz survivor how much money she makes from displaying
her tattoo; he calls Jewish witnesses of the Holocaust
"liars." His Internet site asks
for help in compiling a list of "obviously absurd
eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust," noting that the
contributor who offers the best example will be awarded "the
prestigious Elie Wiesel Prize."

He was kicked out of Germany, where denying the Holocaust
is a crime and free speech is not quite understood. He has
been barred from Canada and Australia, too. His bigotry
contaminates everything he touches, even a nursery verse he
composed for his daughter Jessica, which the defense lawyers
found in his diary:

"I am a Baby Aryan/

Not Jewish or sectarian/

I have no plans to marry/

An ape or Rastafarian."

When a reporter asked him if he regretted writing the
poem, he replied that he regretted only using the word
"Rastafarian." He wished that he had written
"vegetarian."